EDITOR’S NOTE

I initially received this story from Kikuko Tsumura’s translator Polly Barton, and upon first reading I strongly felt that Tsumura’s was a voice I wanted to publish in the magazine. The story made me laugh because its emotional landscape felt so true to me, even though I have never experienced the specific situation of the protagonist. Rendered beautifully in Barton’s translation, Tsumura’s prose is necessarily unadorned, giving the reader precise space to glimpse the tensions that ripple below the surface of the ordinary.

I am grateful to Barton for bringing this piece to us, as well as for her wonderful translation. I would like to share this from Barton on why she chose to translate this story: “I’m really enamored by the way that Tsumurasan creates a voice and an inner world, and . . . find[s] the interest and the poignancy in very mundane and unremarkable experiences. She doesn’t really stick to what she knows but is often taking elderly men or other surprising characters as her lens onto the world, which I find admirable. I think her dry, understated humor that sort of suffuses her prose is wonderful, and it makes it a total joy to read and translate. Also I’ve lived for a while in rural or semi-rural Japan and I felt the story perfectly evoked the quietness of it, the sense that you could fall off the edge of the next street and nobody would notice, juxtaposed with this sense of a very strong-rooted community—so maybe in a way I related to the narrator’s outsiderness.”

Eleanor Chandler, Managing Editor

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